Cindy Gallop

“I always emphasize to people that Make Love Not Porn is not anti-porn because the issue isn’t porn. The issue is: we don’t talk about sex in the real world.”

Cindy Gallop, founder & CEO, MakeLoveNotPorn, is a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, whose background is over 30 years in brand-building, marketing and advertising – she started up the US office of ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty in New York in 1998 and in 2003 was named Advertising Woman of the Year.

She is the founder and CEO of If We Ran The World, co-action software launched in beta at TED 2010 and subsequently written up and taught as a Harvard Business School case study, which enables brands to implement the business model of the future – Shared Values + Shared Action = Shared Profit (financial and social).

She is also the founder of Make Love Not Porn – ‘Pro-sex. Pro-porn. Pro-knowing the difference’ – a social sextech platform designed to promote good sexual behavior and good sexual values, which she launched at TED 2009, and for which she has just raised $2million to build out mlnp.tv as ‘the Social Sex Revolution’. As a result of the funding challenges she has encountered, she is raising the world’s first and only sextech fund, All The Sky Holdings.

She acts as board advisor to a number of tech ventures and works as a personal brand/life/executive coach and a consultant on brand and business innovation for companies around the world, describing her consultancy approach as ‘I like to blow shit up. I am the Michael Bay of business.’ BusinessInsider named her one of 15 Most Important Marketing Strategy Thinkers Today, alongside Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin, and cited her as number 33 on their list of 100 Most Influential Tech Women On Twitter, and number one on their list of Top 30 People In Advertising To Follow On Twitter. Campaign named her number one on their list of Top 10 Trailblazers for both 2016 and 2017.

She has a reputation as a highly compelling and inspirational speaker at conferences and events around the world on a variety of topics: her talks on the future of advertising and marketing have been tweeted as: ‘The most brilliant speech on the future of advertising ever – not the usual buzzword-laden bullshit’; ‘Watching @cindygallop slice and dice the ad industry status quo like a ginsu knife. #purewin’; and ‘There must be a DeLorean parked outside, because Cindy Gallop is from the FUTURE!’ InfluencerCon NYC introduced her as ‘Cindy Gallop is the truth Jack Nicholson told Tom Cruise he couldn’t handle.’ Together with Susan Credle of FCB and Rob Reilly of McCann, Cindy is one of three Campaign Review Committee chairs for the Ad Council in the US, helping to make the work great.

Cindy is an outspoken advocate of diversity and inclusion in advertising, tech and business – she was Jury President at CannesLions 2015 for the inaugural Glass Lion awards, proposed by Sheryl Sandberg to celebrate advertising that shatters gender stereotypes in advertising, and in 2017 was turned by digital agency R/GA into a chatbot for Equal Pay Day that helps women ask for a raise – search AskCindyGallop on Facebook and chat to CindyBot on Facebook Messenger. Cindy has published ‘Make Love Not Porn: Technology’s Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior’ as one of TED’s line of TEDBooks and is currently working on a book about what the world will look like when women share power equally with men.